The Fitzgerald neighborhood project includes landscaping and maintenance of 192 vacant lots, creating productive landscape in place of overgrown and unkempt lots.

Kirk Pinho/Crain's Detroit Business

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan addresses a crowd surrounded by other city officials and community members during a Wednesday event to announce a $4 million-plus revitalization project in the city's Fitzgerald neighborhood.

Courtesy of the city of Detroit

The Fitzgerald neighborhood project includes landscaping and maintenance of 192 vacant lots, creating productive landscape in place of overgrown and unkempt lots.

Courtesy of the city of Detroit

The Fitzgerald neighborhood project includes plans to renovate 115 currently vacant homes, which will be a mixture of rental properties and for sale homes priced at the neighborhood market rate.

Kirk Pinho/Crain's Detroit Business

David Alade, partner and co-founder of Detroit-based Century Partners LLC, is one of the developers on the Fitzgerald neighborhood project, which is expected to take two years to complete.

◀

▶

A team has been chosen to take on a more than $4 million neighborhood redevelopment project in northwest Detroit's Fitzgerald neighborhood after a request for proposal was issued last summer.

The project involves rehabilitating 115 vacant homes in the next two years as for-sale and for-rent and affordable and market-rate housing, creating a 2-acre park and landscaping 192 vacant lots.

Work is expected to begin this spring in the area bounded by three alleys — one south of West McNichols, another west of Livernois, one north of Puritan Avenue — and Greenlawn Avenue.

"Urban revitalization in this country for years has meant you move out the people who are there and build something new," Mayor Mike Duggan said Wednesday at an event at a vacant parcel on Prairie Street.

"In Detroit, we are doing just the opposite. We are doing neighborhood revitalization to keep neighbors here who have stayed here through the tough times."

To accomplish the project, the city is asking the City Council on April 11 to approve the transfer Detroit Land Bank Authority parcels to the Parks and Recreation Department (50 parcels) and the development team (323 parcels), Fitz Forward LLC, which is spearheaded by The Platform LLC and Century Partners LLC, both based in Detroit.

The Platform's co-principals are Peter Cummings and Dietrich Knoer, while Century Partners is lead by co-founder David Alade and Andrew Colom.

The parcels are: 192 vacant lots; 131 parcels with homes on them; and another 50 vacant parcels that would be turned into the new 2-acre Ella Fitzgerald Park and a quarter-mile greenway connecting Marygrove College and the University of Detroit Mercy.

Of the 131 parcels with homes, 16 have blighted houses that will be razed. The remaining homes will be renovated, with 20 percent being for affordable housing for families making 80 percent or less of the area median income.

The 192 vacant lots would be cleared and turned into gardens.

"We've assembled a really, really strong team … We can't wait to get started," Alade said Wednesday.

Financing for the project comes from federal Community Development Block Grants, the Kresge Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, JPB Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. The philanthropic funding comes through a Reimagining the Civic Commons grant the foundations gave to the mayor's $30 million Strategic Neighborhood Fund initiative.

A second phase of the Fitzgerald project targets the commercial corridors of Livernois and McNichols in a $5 million effort, Duggan said.

Also speaking at Wednesday's event were council President Pro-Tem George Cushingberry Jr.; Maurice Cox, the city's planning director; Housing and Revitalization Director James Arthur Jemison; and Devon Buskin, workforce director for The Greening of Detroit, which helped clear lots in advance of the event.

"I look back at this neighborhood and see how it was and see how it is now, and this neighborhood, it was really messed up until The Greening of Detroit came and did something to this neighborhood," said Ronnie Jones, one of the workers on the project.

“This could be the most important project we’ve taken on yet in terms of working toward a stronger Detroit,” The Platform's Cummings said in a statement. “This is a game-changer not just for the Fitzgerald neighborhood and Detroit, but for other cities in our country. Our success will show other cities how they can bring new life to historic neighborhoods.”

The Platform, based in the New Center area, is working on a $250 million-plus development plan in the areas surrounding Grand Boulevard. Among its projects:

a $53 million, 231-unit new apartment development at West Grand Boulevard and Third Avenue

a redevelopment of the 73,000-square-foot building on East Grand Boulevard with an iconic mural on its east-facing side. The company has the building under contract.

The Platform — which is also working on another project in northwest Detroit, plus the Islandview neighborhood near Belle Isle — also said in a news release that the developers will create a nonprofit that will, among other things, facilitate grant funding for Detroit police officers to buy homes in the neighborhood and provide homebuyer education, down-payment assistance programs and develop a free wireless infrastructure for the neighborhood.